Material won't project on spherical mesh? recreating Earth
I figured it out...
Was ridiculously simple..
Projection needed to be flat not spherical and use UV instead of generated. 
I don't know why the need to switch to flat as it's entirely counter intuitive because every tutorial I've come across says to use spherical for sphere shapes.
I also had an unrelated issue with the UV map in the wrong rotation position.
I fixed that and re-imported and changed project to flat.
Then everything worked! lol weird.